Henrietta and the White Chocolate (no Peppermint) Christmas Cake

No peppermint was harmed in the making of this cake. I'd like to try the proper pepperminty version at a later date but at this point in time I thought it might be difficult to market to my current limited clientele of two parents, a cat and six chickens*. Also I made a half recipe of this because it's just after Christmas and frankly no one I know needs any extra cake. The cake itself with just vanilla flavouring is very nice and even though I botched the buttercream, it tasted lovely and I used it as filling rather than icing.

*I need to get back to work because my colleagues will try anything...several times, if required.

Making this cake is quick and easy, although since I'm still in Tassie I had to wait around while the butter softened. At home I only have to take it out of the fridge for a minute and it's at room temperature. 

This is another of Rose's recipes where you mix odd ingredients together to get funny looking mixes - the small bowl with the whisk has egg whites, vanilla and milk - quite a (temporarily) unattractive combination.

The white chocolate custard is brought to you courtesy of Henrietta and friends and their delicious eggs. The girls are big fans of Christmas, just like me, and for similar reasons. Christmas is a scraps bonanza, their top favourites this year being ham fat and Christmas pudding (a sad baking failure due to lack of suet). They're a competitive lot when it comes to food, as you can see. You need to watch out for your toes when the frenzy begins.

You can see how yellow the egg yolks are in the white chocolate custard below. The recipe says to test the temp with an instant thermometer (very good advice) but the toffee thermometer I found was about as instant as dial-up internet.

A not-so-perfect looking cake. It's quite freckly, plus it has a distinct hill on one side despite my efforts to smooth out the batter before I baked it.

I wasn't going to make the white chocolate custard into buttercream because it's not my favourite.  I thought I might add some whipped cream instead and just use it as a mousse-like filling for the cake.  However my mother pointed out there was no problem since she was going to take it for church morning tea and I wasn't going to be eating it anyway (hmmm...a casting vote for the buttercream option). It was hard to argue with that logic so I whipped up the butter and added the custard. It didn't look that good and I think I may have over whipped it. I thought vaguely about looking up ways to fix buttercream but holiday-itis won out and I forgot to care.

'How's the serenity?' Who can worry about cake or icing with this beauty to admire?

Next week the Alpha Bakers are making Lemon and Cranberry Tart Tart. If I remember rightly this is a spectacular looking tart - as photographed in the Baking Bible I mean. I'm not promising anything here.

Baking-rage and reverse marble cake with Rose's chocolate ganache

I thought I was being clever when I made this the first time. I decided to whip up Rose's Reverse Marble Cake a few weeks ago for a work meeting, thinking, rather smugly, that I would be ahead of the Alpha Baker schedule...

HOWEVER making this after work during a very busy work week meant that I didn't take enough notice of the cake tin size (too big), plus the instructions for layering the different coloured cake batters nearly drove me to distraction. I honestly couldn't bear to read 'take just under a third of the batter' one more time. In the end I read over the instructions, got the general idea and just fudged it from there. The pattern turned out quite well but the cake was a bit flat as well as dry on the outside, due to the tin being too big. My colleagues were intrigued by the reverse marble pattern and thought the cake was nice, but I was disappointed. I also forgot to take more than two (yellowish) photos due to my post-work weariness and the near-homicidal rage induced by the instructions.

I've seen a couple of the other Alpha Bakers' posts on this cake and none of them have mentioned problems with the instructions (or homicide) so I think we can deduce from that that I'm just not a very calm baker.

So when the cake came up on the schedule this weekend I thought I would try again and see if I could get a better result. The second try - in the photo immediately below - turned out a better height and more moist, since I used a smaller ring tin (unfortunately I don't have a bundt tin in this size). It did dry out a bit on the top where it rose above the tin and the rest I undercooked slightly. I ignored the instructions this time to avoid enraging myself, and the pattern still turned out nicely. So this cake wasn't an unqualified success the second time round and the flavour didn't wow me either. I'm not sure why but this cake is obviously not meant for me

This is my first slightly flat attempt below. It does look nice with the shape from the bundt tin. I drizzled chocolate ganache on it (which pretty much solves all problems) but I made a wrong calculation in combining the white, milk and dark chocolate I had in the fridge, so it turned out very pale. Couldn't take a trick with this cake.

My goodness this cake batter was delicious. I'd like to try it again without the chocolate. I know that sounds like sacrilege but I'd like to work out why the baked cake flavour didn't impress me that much when it showed such a lot of promise in the batter stage. 

I still forgot to take photos of the initial layering of the two batters for the second cake. It's not difficult to do, even for someone who's definitely on the slapdash end of the baking method scale. The first layer of vanilla batter is put into a small trench in the first chocolate layer, and the other layers all build on that. It's really a fairly simple but clever idea (so I shouldn't complain too much about the instructions).

Despite not being at all exacting (just under a third!) in dishing out the amount for each layer, somehow it came out all right. 

You never quite think the last chocolate layer is going to stretch far enough but it does.

Possibly this tin was a bit too small (hmmph) so the cake rose over the top of the tin. I'm tempted to try this again but there are so many cakes I really love that I might just have to chalk this one up to experience.

Next week the Alpha Bakers are making Sugar Rose Brioche which sounds like the stage name of a blues singer.